REVIEW: ‘TRON: Legacy’ shimmers… simply

With its neon-flecked glassy environs and perpetual stormy nights, TRON: Legacy may be the darkest, sleekest virtual world you’ll ever get lost in. It’s like a simpler, glossier spin on The Matrix and Blade Runner, pretty cyberpunk with an underlying theme about where blood ends and binary code begins. And while Legacy may lack the sophistication of those other science fiction masterworks, it certainly shimmers with the prettiest digital eye-candy you’ll ever see.

In Legacy, we see at first glance a lot has changed since the original TRON, the 1982 flick that first sucked Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) into a prismatic world where humanoid programs in reflective-trimmed unitards fling glowing Frisbees called identity discs and race wall-trailing motorbikes called light cycles. In Legacy, Flynn’s a years-long prisoner of a much darker TRONiverse ruled by a despot called Clu, a perfection-craving program Flynn made in his own image years ago and that maintains Bridges’ more youthful appearance thanks to some kind of creepy but pretty convincing CGI.

It’s a fitting metaphor for Flynn’s other lost “creation” — his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund), who last saw his dad when he was just a kid and is now a 27-year-old tech rebel who zips through the streets on his dad’s motorbike and pulls software pranks on his dad’s company Encom. Father and son finally reunite after Sam discovers his dad’s secret workstation at his old arcade (ah, the good old days of coin-ops) and gets zapped into the machine.

And, oh, what a machine it is. Legacy goes from earth-toned 2D to iridescent 3D the moment Sam runs out into the Grid, a “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment if ever there was one. We now see streets that resemble dark Swarovski shops and digital denizens that rock black Kevlar-like biker suits with hints of luminescence, an outfit Sam gets fitted with by four aptly-named Sirens. Like his dad, Sam’s also indoctrinated into this new world via gladiatorial “games” where the identity discs are more razor-like and the light cycles are more fluid. To win is to survive; to lose is to die in a burst of crystallized blocks called deresolution.

These and so many other action sequences in Legacy look positively gorgeous, especially in 3D. I’m not a big 3D fan (I’d rather just see films in high definition than three dimension) but it really works with Legacy because you’re quite literally inside such an unreal world, one tailor-made for what’s typically an unnecessary gimmick.

Thing is, once you look past all this radiant, technologically-upgraded imagery you see what makes Legacy such a carbon copy of its predecessor.

Like TRON before it, Legacy is also a visually-engaging but ultimately simplistic computer adventure that just scratches the surface of life beyond the machine. Legacy expands on that somewhat with what the elder Flynn calls “the miracle” — new program lifeforms called “isos” that manifested on their own instead of just from the code-writing of a human programmer called a user. But for those few moments we do get any neo-theology (a bearded Bridges as a godlike figure) or neo-biology (what isos could bring to real world medicine), Legacy devotes the bulk of its CGI and 2-plus hour running time to Clu and his mysterious right-hand warrior Rinzler (Dan Shor) chasing the Flynns and their Jules Verne-loving ally program Quorra (Olivia Wilde) across the Grid as father and son scramble to get back to the real world. Mind you, I thoroughly enjoyed all that action. But I can’t help but wonder if Legacy would have benefited from its own unicorn dream or there-is-no-spoon moment.

As it stands, TRON: Legacy is pretty much the same older TRON film for a younger generation — a gorgeous digital diversion that would rather use the meaning-of-life questions it raises as springboards to the next stunning action scene instead of set pieces all their own. That’s hardly a bad thing for what still amounts to an engaging, glossy good popcorn flick.